Selling the Unknown: Articulating the Business Value of New OSS Technology

Managing change in the open source community

• Engage with the community to gather insights and contribute back to the framework
• Write a pitch that includes the expected efforts and success stories, but also the need for money
• Be prepared for change in the industry, including new vendors and changing narratives
• Manage change by shopping for alternatives, tackling claims, updating the narrative, and exploring partnerships

The speaker explains that the emergence of a new open source project in the same problem space resulted in $54 million being invested by VCs. This highlights the need to be prepared for change and to manage it effectively.

Nowadays, Backstage is a known Cloud native incubating project used and endorsed by industry leaders like RedHat, VMware, and HP. But three years ago, it was a new project with no enterprise support that was applying an odd pattern to solve an emerging problem. Back then, terms like “Developer Portal”, “Developer Experience”, or “Platform Engineering” were mostly unheard of. When the technology’s value is as unknown as its risk, how do you convince your team to adopt it? Moreover, how do you sell it? Drawing from his experience pioneering the commercialization of Backstage, Jorge will show you tips to construct a narrative that communicates the business value of new Cloud native projects and adapt it when the context changes — and, oh boy, it changes fast! By the end of this talk, you’ll feel more confident putting together proposals for internal and external stakeholders so they’re willing to invest in adopting new OSS projects.